Obviously, Everyone Can Become A Great Artist

My parents got my son a kids' tablet last Christmas. Jasper was 3-years-old when he opened it up, meaning he can currently remember a time before he had the tablet, but one day soon it'll feel like something that was always in his life. We let him play with the tablet for 30 minute stretches, and he primarily uses it to access three apps. They are:

1. Living Books, a series Broderbund initially released in the 90s, now made available by a company called Wanderful, as in "to be full of wander." These are picture books with animation and voice acting, and you can tap around to make background characters break out in song or have a narrator read a sign out loud. Wanderful has released Berenstain Bears, Arthur and Jack Prelutsky titles, plus a few religious stories Jasper isn't aware of.

2. Duolingo ABC, a program that helps kids learn to read and write.

3. PBS Kids Games, which contains, according to PBS' app store description, over 280 games.

As far as I'm aware, the tablet can't directly connect to a web browser. Jasper will be able to open the app store and look around at things when he's able to read, but he can only download new apps if I input a PIN. We haven't installed YouTube, so there's no danger of him wandering into the Desert of AI Bullshit. If I intentionally turned a dozen child locks off, I suppose he could find his way to iBeer or Kalshi, but that's like saying if I abandoned him in the woods, he'd be in danger of getting lost. The security is tight. I forgot the tablet's PIN over the weekend and I couldn't so much as access new Sesame Street games within the PBS Kids app.

What we could access, because we'd already downloaded it, was a game about patterns, featuring characters from the PBS cartoon Work It Out Wombats! Jasper wanted me to play it too, and the game and I helped him understand how to look at a repeating series of items and figure out what should come next.

I'm hammering home how educational and benign the tablet is because the highest-grossing movie currently in wide release is Toy Story 5, about an evil tablet that addicts kids to its apps and leads them to neglect their other toys. I haven't seen the movie– it's possible the story becomes more nuanced than its marketing materials suggest and the whole thing isn't merely Pixar warning that your kids are going to start spending too much time in pool halls, quoting Captain Billy's Whiz Bang– and I don't like being backed into the corner of defending a tech product that hasn't done the world much good, but I have watched my son trace the ABCs into his tablet and then go off and race Hot Wheels cars. He's no more addicted to the tablet than he is those cars, his books or the Power Rangers Happy Meal toys my wife saved from her childhood. We've never shoved the tablet in his face so that he'd leave us alone during dinner. He dances as much today as he danced last summer. I see no reason to make him feel bad about using a screen to play learning games with Daniel Tiger.

This is the Pixar trap. I wrote a few years ago about how the studio creates emotional uncanny valleys that do kids a disservice, and I'll update that and repost it here in the near future, but this is something I've been thinking a lot about again recently, as Pixar's Toy Story 5 climbs to a billion dollar gross and Skydance's Ray Gunn, from once and future Pixar higher-up Brad Bird, premieres at the Annecy International Animation Festival.

I get emotional thinking about PBS Kids' best shows. I get emotional thinking about anything that truly expresses empathy, beyond a wedged-in lesson where the good guy shakes the bad guy's hand and the bad guy says he's learned that being nice can feel even more radical than calling other kids names. When we started watching Sesame Street with Jasper a few years ago, I was introduced to Julia, a muppet on the autism spectrum. Julia appeared in Sesame Street and Autism: See Amazing In All Children in 2015 and became a mainline Sesame Street character two years later. The Children's Television Workshop created Julia with heavy input from the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. Julia deals with sensory overload and her friends do what they can to accommodate her. She also just exists, showing up in plenty of sketches and plot lines where the entire focus isn't on her autism. I know Julia has made children feel seen because we went to the Sesame Place theme park a few weeks ago for Jasper's birthday and I saw a kid in a Julia shirt.

Since 2002, Sesame Street's Nigerian and South African editions have included Kami, an HIV-positive muppet. Kami's made appearances on the US show. There's also Alex, a muppet whose dad is in jail and who deals with all the complicated shame that could inspire. These characters are shy around others but pretty quickly learn that they are accepted. Growing up, I endlessly watched a Sesame Street video tape called Don't Eat The Pictures, which featured Linda, a deaf woman. She was on the show from 1971 to 2002. Her deafness wasn't her only characteristic. She was a person. The show has always featured multiracial, multicultural casts and it's been on the air since 1969. It took Pixar 17 years to release a movie with a girl main character and another 5 to release a movie with a non-white main character (or a non-white-coded character– you can't tell me Owen Wilson and Larry the Cable Guy's Cars characters are supposed to be Hispanic, but I guess if somebody provides proof the Dave Foley ant in A Bug's Life is supposed to be Chinese, I'll delete this post). You can tell that the people behind Sesame Street know they're reaching kids at an impressionable age and that they take the responsibilities inherent in that access seriously. They can mess up– Julia appeared in a PSA associated with the controversial Autism Speaks, leading the Autism Self Advocacy Network to cut ties with the show– but I feel safe trusting Sesame Street to enrich my child's life at least a little. I've certainly never scrambled to turn the TV off because Grover was looking into the camera, giving toxic advice on how to accept other cultures or deal with sad thoughts.

I have a much harder time with Pixar. The movies are well-made technically, they're often gorgeous, but I don't know that they're communicating much beyond "be nice" or "sometimes you will feel nervous" or "people can work in teams." That's in the best cases. Just as often, it's "you are emotionally devastating toys you don't play with" or "moving on is bad" or, apparently, "your tablet is dangerously manipulative and is making you a zombie." You don't put that on a kid. You don't make a kid think they're doing something wrong for no reason. Tell adults to use their phones less, preach the anti-algorithmic gospel, please, but my son doesn't need to be told the learning apps he plays with for, at most, 30 minutes a day are less legitimate than Toy Story merch. If the big theme is that parents should be aware of what their kids take in, then 1) no shit, and 2) don't communicate that in a way that also implicates the toy, and thus the child playing with the toy, itself. The disparity between Pixar's filmmaking and their content reminds me of King Crimson, in that I know all those guys are incredibly talented musicians, but they've used their skills to write time signature porn.

The worst Pixar lessons come from Brad Bird's Ratatouille. Bird's written and directed three films with Pixar– The Incredibles movies and Ratatouille-- plus he's credited in 13 others as a member of the company's Senior Creative Team and he's got sole writing credit on Incredibles 3, set for release in 2028.

People often talk about the Randian "fuck participation trophies, man, we should let the self-proclaimed smartest, strongest people do what they want without any oversight" message of The Incredibles (and Tomorrowland, made for Disney outside of Pixar). Ratatouille seems to get a pass, though it's ugly in its own way. In that movie, a rat named Remy dreams of becoming a chef, recognizes society would never let him see that dream through, and then he becomes a chef, like he's an architect in a Rand book. There are plenty of bland, cliched Hobby Lobby throw pillow ideas in Ratatouille– I don't know why the film is so smug when it notes the only predictable thing about life is its unpredictability– but the big message, the one Peter O'Toole's critic arrives at in the film's climax and says to the camera, is this: "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."

Fuck that. With everything I have, until I can't write anymore, fuck that. I'll babble it until I pass out: "Fuck that."

Ratatouille introduces the idea that anybody can be an artist but even then has to correct itself and delineate between the elite and those bound to fail. And note the word "become," where Bird could have written "be." Not "you may not have been born a great artist" or "you may not currently be a great artist," but "you may not ever be able to become one." Some people never stand a chance.

My son has seen Ratatouille. I don't think he gave its themes a ton of thought. He probably reached the surface-level conclusion that the movie is mostly saying "This rat is cool." Jasper's sense of cultural and social criticism is not the best. He's barely read any bell hooks. I gave him a Joan Didion book to at least thumb through and that kid looked me right in the eye and said "Papa, please, let me instead watch YouTube compilations of Mortal Kombat fatalities on my tablet, or, as I call it, my second soul."

I don't think Jasper's been scarred by the parable of the uber-rat, but when he grows up, if he wants to watch Ratatouille at 9 or 10, we're going to have to have a conversation about "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."

Anyone can become a great artist. You put in the time, you express what you want to express in the way you want to express it, you have the basic level of empathy all great art possesses, I consider you a great artist. Maybe you don't write Music for Airports or Actual Air, maybe you don't inspire in others what Eleanor Davis' The Hard Tomorrow and Libby's Dad inspire in me, but there isn't a capacity limit on this room and the existence of life-changing art does not preclude the existence of merely great art.

I'm not exaggerating my feelings when I say it is plainly immoral to tell a child that they may not have what it takes to be a great artist unless you are also telling them that hierarchies in art are foul, art isn't a race you can improve your lap time on, and nobody is inherently any greater than anybody else as long as everybody considered is genuinely attempting to express something. Not everybody can swim the English Channel, but everybody can be a great artist. Not everybody can secure a MacArthur Fellowship, but everybody can be a great artist.

I do not know why a person would want to communicate "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere" to kids. Yes, animation is for everybody and older people enjoy Pixar films too and blah, blah, blah, but adults aren't the ones wearing Remy the Rat underwear and dressing up as Chef Linguini for Halloween. The Ratatouille trailer didn't play before No Country For Old Men and the Ratatouille Game Boy Advance cartridge wasn't being marketed to 40-year-olds. Ratatouille is a movie for children.

And given all the resources of Disney and peak-credibility Pixar, Brad Bird said that not everybody can be a great artist. He didn't put his message in a dark, genuinely subversive movie like Tár, he wasn't making a Todd Solondz film, he threaded that message into a story where a plucky rat shows his dumbass rat family how to properly season soup.

Plenty of people are going to communicate to my son, both blatantly and otherwise, that he isn't and will never be enough. He'll be told that by bullies, skin care commercials, social media, capitalism, and whatever physical limitations he discovers in himself. He's going to her it from his own brain. The best thing I can do is to help give him the tools to push back and not take those messages to heart. The worst thing I can do is let John Lasseter's homeboy put forth the idea that he may not have been born to be exceptional.